Guy Sues Facebook For His Failure To Be Elected To Congress

from the proving-why-you-shouldn't-be-in-congress dept

Another day, another silly lawsuit. Michael Scott points us to this hilarious lawsuit from Majed Moughni, who tried to run for Congress last year in Michigan. He came in fourth in the primaries, but he's suing Facebook, claiming it's responsible for his loss. How so? Well, he claims that he was accumulating friends on Facebook in the lead up to the primaries, and then Facebook killed his account. Facebook notes that his account was halted because of activity that appeared to be doing things similar to spammers -- and that users who face this issue are alerted to it before their accounts are cut off. It seems likely that this lawsuit will get tossed out pretty damn quickly, as soon as Facebook points out that it has every right to deny service to folks based on a desire to protect users. Section 230 allows companies to filter as they see fit and not see any liability for those choices, and it seems that this case should be covered. Of course, for someone running for Congress, you would hope they actually understood the law on these issues, but I guess that's not really a requirement.

It may be a new millenium...

but the "Like" button is not exactly the same thing as voting. It'll get there eventually, but Moughni learned the hard way, like all true pioneers do, that sometimes you have to wait for the future to catch up with you.

And like all pioneers, he'll have his forward-thinking lawsuit tossed out of court so fast, he won't even have a chance to die of dysentery first.

Re:

Wait, n/m. I looked up Majed Moughni and he was running for the 15th district, different district. My mistake.

Interestingly, my second cousin (whom I will not name) won his election mostly just through facebook. Little, if any, mainstream media help. So the Internet is definitely changing how elections are being done and who wins and it is definitely giving other people a much more reasonable opportunity to win elections.

More to the story

"Moughni had about 1,600 Facebook “friends” and was adding between 20 and 100 a day when the account was shut down. The wheels were set in motion, he believes, when Dingell supporters complained to Facebook about comments Moughni made on his page criticizing the Congressman for introducing a resolution recognizing Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga’s near-perfect game last year. Instead of that, Moughni said, Dingell should have been condemning the assault of Turkish aid workers headed for Palestine by Israeli security workers.

Re: It may be a new millenium...

As far as I can tell from the story, he was using a personal Facebook profile to promote himself, not a fan page. Personal profiles can only have 5000 friends; was he planning on suing Facebook for that too? (The person who won apparently had 6000 people who liked his page.)

He chose the wrong tool for the job and then got upset when he couldn't do what he wanted with it. Maybe he could sue foursquare too for only letting people who were actually at his rallies check in, rather than everyone in the state.